Face Jobs

Curses, Foiled AgainWhen two men tried to rob a 69-year-old woman sitting in her car in South Daytona, Fla., one of them smashed a hole in her windshield with a semiautomatic handgun, but the weapon fell through the hole into the driver’s lap. Carol J. Costello grabbed the gun and pointed it at the suspect, who fled to his getaway vehicle. She copied down the license number before it pulled away. The gunman also dropped a cell phone, which had pictures of him that Costello identified, leading police to Raymond Lewis Shepard, 25. The second robber wasn’t named. (Orlando Sentinel)

• Police identified Terrance Mitchell as one of two men who stole security cameras from a home-improvement store in Waterloo, Iowa, because the store’s security camera recorded the theft. (Associated Press)

• In the aftermath of British Petroleum’s oil spew in the Gulf of Mexico (94 million to 184 million gallons—so far), a worker on the oil rig that caught fire and exploded, sparking the disaster, told a government panel investigating the accident that the general safety alarm was routinely kept on silent mode to avoid waking the crew with late-night sirens and emergency lights. “They did not want people woke up at 3 a.m. from false alarms,” chief electronics technician Mike Williams said. (The New York Times)

Face JobsChinese companies are hiring white people to pose as employees or business partners to impress clients and officials. To have a few foreigners hanging around means a company has prestige, money and connections to do business abroad, according to Zhang Haihua, author of “Think Like Chinese,” who explains: “Because Western countries are so developed, people think they are more well off, so people think that if a company can hire foreigners, it must have a lot of money and have very important connections overseas. So when they really want to impress someone, they may roll out a foreigner.” Some companies hire Caucasians for a few hours a day to sit near a window where clients and customers can see them. The mostly male posers, typically out-of-work models and actors or English teachers, can earn as much as 2,000 yuan (about $300) for a day’s work, which requires them to be white, smile and look good in a suit. (CNN)

• Vaseline introduced an application for Facebook in India that lets users lighten their profile pictures. Bollywood actor Shahid Kapur is promoting the download, which is designed to promote Vaseline’s line of skin-lightening creams for men. Ads depict him with his face divided into dark and fair halves. (Fox News)

How Democracy WorksIeshuh Griffin announced that she’s running for the Wisconsin Assembly as an independent candidate with the slogan “NOT the whiteman’s bitch” under her name on the ballot. The state allows candidates who aren’t Republicans or Democrats to add a five-word statement of purpose on the ballot to explain their candidacy. The state Government Accountability Board, which administers state election laws, rejected Griffin’s slogan, however, ruling that it was derogatory. Griffin vowed to sue the board, whose six members of the board are former judges and white, for infringing on her freedom of speech. “I’m not making a derogatory statement toward an ethnic group,” Griffin told the board. “I’m stating what I’m not.” Shane Falk, a staff attorney for the board, said Griffin, who describes herself as a “30ish” community activist, is free to use the phrase “NOT the whiteman’s bitch” in her campaign literature and ads. (Milwaukee’s Journal-Sentinel)

• Debate in the Taiwanese legislature on how to review the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement signed by Taiwan and China opened with ruling and opposition lawmakers pushing and shoving each other, exchanging blows and throwing objects at each other, including garbage cans, tea cups and a timer. Two legislators wound up in the hospital, one with a broken rib. (The Taipei Times)

Compiled from the nation’s press by Roland Sweet. Authentication on demand.